Intuit’s target market for cloud computing services is the small- and medium-sized businesses that use its popular QuickBooks application to run their day-to-day financial operations. Intuit has used this[more…]

In the community of cloud community services, confusion and debate continue over the definition of a private cloud. The phrase private cloud refers to a highly virtualized cloud data center located inside[more…]

What are your private cloud computing data center and IT operations actually costing you? It isn’t a simple question to answer. Most companies divide the area of expenses for IT into two buckets:[more…]

The services components (internal or partners) of services-led technology vendors have developed best practices over thousands of engagements and all this experience is brought to the forefront of each[more…]

Creating a cloud strategy is a complicated process. A cloud infrastructure needs a well-defined architecture or it can’t scale and won’t be manageable. Do you need lots of help with cloud strategy development[more…]

How you use all sorts of software with cloud computing in your organization is changing dramatically — whether you’re considering a supply chain as a service or a word processor as a service. Although[more…]

Cloud computing standards are a core set of common and repeatable best practices that have been agreed upon by a business or industry group. Typically, different vendors, industry user groups, and end[more…]

No matter what type of Platform as a Service (PaaS) you’re investigating, some technologies are needed to supplement these cloud computing platforms. There are too many emerging technologies or vendors[more…]

The economics of the Software as a Service (SaaS) market in cloud computing are different than the traditional perpetual license software model. In the perpetual license model, the customer pays for the[more…]

When Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors become well-established brands in the market, they attract an ecosystem (a set of partners that works directly with a key vendor, both in technical and go-to-market[more…]

Because Software as a Service (SaaS) has been around longer than most other types of cloud computing, hundreds, if not thousands, of companies are trying to become leaders. It costs a lot of money initially[more…]

What Software as a Service companies are out in the market today selling packaged software for cloud computing that you should look at? It isn’t as straightforward as it might sound. This is a dynamic[more…]

In the future, companies are likely to offer unified communications (an integration of telephony, instant messaging, and e-mail) as a service for cloud computing. Collaboration is one of the natural markets[more…]

A hypervisor is an operating system, which means that it knows how to act as a traffic cop to make things happen in an orderly manner. The hypervisor sits at the lowest levels of the hardware environment[more…]

Managing a virtual environment involves some foundational issues that determine how well the components function as a system. These issues include how licenses are managed, how workloads are controlled[more…]

Using virtual machines complicates IT security in a big way for both companies running private cloud computing and service providers. Virtualization changes the definition of what a server is, so security[more…]

Desktop and device asset management help you select, buy, use, and maintain desktop hardware and software. From a management perspective, you should understand that cloud computing desktop virtualization[more…]

In the cloud computing environment, the support service is driven by the data center’s trouble-ticketing system, which tracks a problem to its resolution and quickly identifies situations in which the[more…]

Identity management is a broad topic that applies to most areas of the data center. However, it’s particularly important in protecting the cloud computing environment. Because the cloud is about sharing[more…]

Cloud computing service providers each have their own way of managing security. There are three specific groups of IT security products — activity logs, host-based intrusion protection systems and network-based[more…]